Finding The Forgotten Creators Of The Oxford English Dictionary
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No, we're not talking about the Bible. We're talking about the dictionary. One of my most prized possessions is my Oxford English Dictionary, which I received as a trophy when I won my elementary school spelling bee. I had all of my teachers and classmates sign it, and it was such a cherished award.

I used it constantly, even throughout college. I was an academic librarian. I used the Oxford English Dictionary regularly and still do in my retirement. The vast variety of words and depth of research into each word can't be found anyplace else.

I grew up before the internet and we had a double volume copy of the Oxford English Dictionary in our house. It was front and center on the secretary at the top of our stairs when you walked in the door. And anytime we had a question, it was so frustrating because my dad would say, "Go look it up in the OED." And so my sisters and I would have to grab the magnifying glass and we'd have to dig through and find the word and

and usually wind up discussing it. It was a great lesson. And now the OED sits in my house and I love it much.

Thanks for those messages. The Oxford English Dictionary is the longest dictionary of English in the world, but many of its creators went unknown for years, until now. They included hundreds of women, those without formal education, and people living in mental institutions. In other words, the people who helped make the Oxford English Dictionary were as diverse as the words in it. How

How did the Oxford English Dictionary come to be? And how has our relationship to the dictionary changed a century later, especially in the internet age? I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast, where we get to the heart of the story. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.

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Joining us for this discussion is Sarah Ogilvie. She's a linguist and a former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. She's also the author of The Dictionary People, the unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary. Sarah, it's great to have you on the program.

It's great to be with you, Jen. Also with us is Anne Curzan. She's a professor of English at the University of Michigan. Her latest book is called Says Who? A kinder, funner usage guide for everyone who cares about words. Professor Curzan, welcome to the program. Jen, I'm delighted to be here to talk about dictionaries.

Now, before we get into our discussion on the dictionary, I want to define a few words that might come up in today's conversation. Now, Sarah, you're a linguist and a lexicographer. What is a lexicographer? A lexicographer is someone who writes dictionaries. So very simple. You write dictionaries. Okay. Now, Professor Curzan, you're a linguist, but you're not a lexicographer. What does a linguist do?

So a linguist studies languages scientifically or systematically, and you can study the sound system or syntax or semantics. I study the history of the English language. And as part of that, I have studied the history of dictionaries.

Now, it's funny. I think most of us have likely seen an Oxford English Dictionary lying around and probably not given it much thought. We heard from the one listener whose father always sent them to the dictionary to look words up. I had an immediate flashback of my mother doing the exact same thing when we'd ask her how to spell a word. She'd say, look it up. But Sarah, what is the Oxford English Dictionary and what makes it different from other dictionaries?

That's such a great question because the Oxford English Dictionary, and being the largest English dictionary in the world, it's the big 20-volume work of

It is actually different from your other smaller desktop dictionaries in the sense that, well, there are two types of dictionaries. There are synchronic dictionaries and there are diachronic dictionaries. So your synchronic dictionaries are like your smaller desktop dictionaries, your Random House, your Merriam-Webster's. They give you a snapshot of language at a moment in time. The diachronic dictionary, which is the Oxford English Dictionary,

gives you the biography of every word and shows you the very first time that that word was used in a written source, traces the life of that word throughout history until the current day. And that's why it's so long and so big, because basically after...

the head word, the etymology, and then the meaning, after that is this quotation paragraph. It's a paragraph of...

quotations showing you how that word has been used from its very first instance and then in lots of other sources in books and magazines and newspapers right up until the current day. Professor Curzan, why was the idea that a dictionary could describe a word, not just tell you how it should be used, but

It's history. It's deeper meaning or evolved meanings. Why was that such a radical idea when the OED was first created? Well, I think it helps to just think about the ambition of that project.

So you imagine in the middle of the 19th century, this idea of an English dictionary that is going to tell the history of every word in the English language. And I can hear the applause where everyone says, that's a fantastic idea. And then you all look at each other and say, how are we going to do that?

How are you going to find all the material you would need to, as Sarah said, come up with the first time that word has been recorded in print and then work through all its meanings and all the changes it's undergone over time? And of course, this is the middle of the 19th century. We don't have computers anymore.

People have to send things through the mail if it's going to get to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. So the ambition of the project was stunning. And this gets us to Sarah's book of all the people who had to be involved in

for that project to come to fruition. Well, Sarah, your book, The Dictionary People, is about the thousands of unknown individuals who helped compile the hundreds of thousands of words in the Oxford English Dictionary. And many of these people went unacknowledged for decades, but you found their names in an old address book. How did you make this discovery?

I did. Well, as Anne was saying, when this dictionary was first proposed in 1858 by a small group of men at the London Philological Society, they thought to themselves, how on earth are we going to create a dictionary that is so massive with every word in it? And they were so smart because they came up with the idea of crowdsourcing it.

And they realised that a small group of men in London or in Oxford couldn't do such a massive task alone. So they reached out to people all around the world and said, could you please read your local books and write out quotations from those books on little slips of four by six inch paper called slips?

and write out quotations, giving us the date of the book, the author, the title, and then the actual quotation, and send them in to us. They had no idea whether this would be a success or not. It actually ended up being such a success. Thousands of quotations were suddenly sent into James Murray's house. So many...

people sent in slips that he had, that Royal Mail had to put a red pillar box outside his house at 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, just down the road from me now. And that red pillar box is still there. There is now a blue plaque on James Murray's house saying this is where the dictionary was created.

So over time, we've known that there were probably several hundred people who sent in slips, but we've never known exactly how many. And when I used to work as an editor on the dictionary, I would go down into the basement, which is where all these slips are still kept. And you go down into the basement under the offices of Oxford University Press, and there are hundreds of boxes storing these slips.

And I would look around at these slips, recognising that there are over 2 million slips stored there, thinking to myself, there's got to be more than just a few hundred people who sent in slips. So let's just go to 10 years ago when I was waiting for a visa to come through to go to a new job over at Stanford.

And my visa was luckily delayed by two weeks. So to pass time, I went to all my favorite places in Oxford before leaving Oxford. And one of those favorite places is down in that basement. And I was just looking through some boxes. And sure enough, I take the lid of this dusty box and there's this little black book in there tied with a cream ribbon, which I'd never seen before. And when I opened it up, I

I immediately recognised James Murray, that's the longest serving editor, his impeccable handwriting. And I realised that this was his 150-year-old address book, that how...

that held the names and addresses of everyone around the world who sent in words and quotations for the creation of the dictionary. And not just their names and their addresses, but actually every book that each person read, the number of slips that they sent into him from each book, and the date that he received them. What a remarkable find. We'll take a quick pause here and we'll be back in just a moment.

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Let's get back to the conversation. Professor Curzan, we call it the dictionary. Not a dictionary, but it's just as if there's only one. Why?

Well, it's a phrase that I'm fascinated by when you hear people say, go look it up in the dictionary. Now, sometimes as we've been talking about, the Oxford English Dictionary is sometimes called the dictionary. But what I love about the conversation we're having is that we're revealing the very human hands behind all dictionaries.

And so the phrase, look it up in the dictionary, hides the fact that dictionaries, including our desk dictionaries, collegiate dictionaries, they're all different. They're published by different publishing houses. They're edited by different people. They have different philosophies for how they come at the work. And importantly, they were published in different years.

And I grew up in a house where we had this really old dictionary. It was my mother's college dictionary. So it was from the late 50s, early 60s. And it was the place we went to look up words. And it never occurred to me or anyone in my family that it might be out of date, that it was not capturing new words or new meanings of words. It was just, quote unquote, the dictionary.

But we also often think a word is real because it's in a dictionary. And we'll get into how words are chosen in a moment. But Professor Curzan, from the perspective of a linguist, what makes a word real? I think when people say to me, Anne, is that a real word? What they mean is, Anne, is that word in standard dictionaries? Because just in asking me the question, odds are that we know what that word is.

Because we're both using it and we know what it means. So a word is a real word if it is meaningful within a speech community. So if I can use the word and it conveys to you the meaning that I have in mind, then it's a word. And dictionary editors will say, we're just trying to keep up with all of you. You are changing the language. You're creating new words. You're changing the meanings of words.

And they are watching us and tracking words and new meanings and then trying to catch them in dictionaries, which is easier now that many of them are online. But the fact that a new word isn't in a dictionary yet doesn't mean it's not real. It just means the editors haven't been able to get it into a dictionary yet. Well, it also makes me think about how we have, I guess what I would call language ecosystems. So there are certain...

words we use in our family that don't mean anything to people outside of our family. My mother, I hope she's listening. I hope she doesn't get mad at it. She used to tell us sometimes,

You're Farsi. And that meant you needed to go take a shower. So you would get to it. And I remember using that word outside of my familial circle and just getting blank stares. I was like, oh, that's not a word people use outside of my familial ecosystem. But Sarah, as I said, you were an editor for the Oxford English Dictionary. What process does a word have to go through to make it into that publication? Well,

So basically, you want to put a word, like a word can only get into the dictionary if it can be verified and traced and tracked. So therefore, you need evidence of it in a written source. And similar to your story, Jen, about your family words.

I, too, when I first started as an editor on the OED, I'd been working there for about two years and I was working on the letter P and I happened to be working on the word pig. And I observed within the entry for pig, which went for many, many columns, that there was no sense of pig meaning nothing.

nasal snot. And I thought, oh, this is my moment to get a new sense into the dictionary. So I went up to the chief editor and also I thought this is my first chance to sort of show myself to the chief editor. So I said, oh, you know, this nasal snot sense of pig isn't there. And he said, oh,

I've never heard of that. And I said, oh, well, it must be an Australianism since I'm from Australia. So he said, well, I can get it into the dictionary if you find examples of it in written sources and then we can verify it and therefore it has a legitimate place in the dictionary. So I spent the entire next week trying to find this sense of pig in a written source.

Couldn't find it anywhere. I finally rang my mother in Sydney, said, Mom, you know, I can't find it anywhere. And she said, Sarah, you can't put that word in the dictionary. That's our family word. I just think that's fascinating. But it makes me wonder, and I'd love to hear from both of you as linguists, how you straddle the line between what is language

I suppose, sort of established words, what's in the dictionary or a dictionary, while also embracing the fluidity and changing nature of our language. And...

It's a great question and one that dictionary editors are thinking about all the time, as well as linguists. So as Sarah said, there's the process of a word being established enough to get into dictionaries, which is different from a word being a real word. Because a word can be functioning in our communities or, as you both have noted, in our families. My family word was plog, which is a combination of plug and clog.

So, Sarah, your nose can be plugged, just in case you were wondering. And it's interesting when you think about the Oxford English Dictionary and Sarah's story, which is that you need to have written evidence. Now, of course, there are words that are circulating in the spoken language, and much of language change, I would go so far as to say most of language change, happens in speech.

And then it gets written down. So you're going to have a lot of change that is happening in the language. And then eventually it will get recorded. Now, this is also changing all around us with social media because we are getting written records of much more informal language at a faster pace.

And so now lexicographers have to think about how do they handle social media and the evidence on social media as they're trying to track a word and honestly trying to see if a word's going to stick. Because there are also slang words that have a very short shelf life before they become uncool and sort of fall off the radar. So Sarah, I don't know what you'd add to that.

Yeah, and just to say that as lexicographers, we're so excited by social media because really for the first time ever, we can basically track and trace the use of a word in real time. And words are spreading at such a fast rate now. And the most important thing is for that quotation to be dated. And the good thing about social media platforms such as Blue Sky or Twitter is that

You can have tweets, they are all dated, and so you can have archives of tweets, and that's why now the Oxford English Dictionary does include quotations from tweets.

We got this email from Michael who says,

Sarah, as we've said, there were thousands of people who contributed to the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. We can't discuss all of them, but just tell us about one person whose story really sticks with you.

Absolutely, Jen. Well, that person, I'm so excited to have heard about that person who's related to Dr. Miner because Dr. Miner is, so thanks to the address books, we now know that there were 3,000 people who sent in slips. And Dr. Miner, as that caller says, actually sent in, actually thanks to these address books, we know that he sent in 56,000 words.

And his story has been told brilliantly by Simon Winchester in The Professor and the Madman. But in fact, we now know that there were three murderers. So he was just one murderer. And he happened to also be living in Broadmoor Mental Asylum, as they were called then. They were called lunatic asylums. Well, in fact, the top four contributors...

were all in psychiatric hospitals and all had connections with them. And so there is in fact, and they were called back then lunatic asylums, and the British censuses put in a new column to classify someone as whether they were, quote, a lunatic or not. And in fact, many of the people identified

within these 3,000 were in psychiatric hospitals. And in Dr. Minor's case, yes, he certainly was a very troubled soul. But many others, I think, were just like myself,

People are on the spectrum and neurodiverse. And this kind of work, I think, suited and still does suit many people who are like that. In fact, the top contributor sent in 165,000 slips in just a 10-year period. So we are talking about people who devoted every working, like, you know,

every hour of their day to this task. And we've never before now been able to shine a light on these people and to give them credit for their fantastic work because without them, there is no way that the dictionary would have been created because the editors wouldn't have had evidence for all of these words. Let's take a quick pause here. We'll be back with more in just a moment. Stay with us.

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Let's get back to the discussion and turn now to one of the largest crowdsourcing dictionary projects out there today, Urban Dictionary. In 2019, Urban Dictionary drew around 65 million visitors each month. Now, similar to Wikipedia, you can suggest a word to be included in the database much faster than a formal dictionary. So, Sarah, it's interesting because there's some alignment there when you think about the OED as a crowdsourced project, but

But now you have something like Urban Dictionary, also crowdsourced, but able to work much more quickly and reach such a broad range of people. How do you think online platforms are changing our relationship to dictionaries?

Absolutely, and the Urban Dictionary is a fantastic source and it's certainly one of the first places that a lexicographer goes to when they're putting a new word into the dictionary, when they want to gauge when was that word first used because most of the time those words have been added by younger web users and around the time that they first use

are familiar with them. So they're a great gauge for the lexicographer as to when a word first started. Anne? I absolutely agree. And I would urge caution when using urban dictionary because unlike the OED, which as Sarah was saying, is carefully curated with expert lexicographers,

You can learn a lot on Urban Dictionary, and part of what you can learn is about social attitudes and biases when you look at the example sentences that are in there, when you look at some of the definitions that people have put in, looking at what's being voted up and voted down. But it's important to recognize that that is not curated properly.

the way that a dictionary coming from Merriam-Webster or American Heritage, Oxford, is going to be curated. So lots to learn, but be aware of what kind of source it is. Well, William writes, when I graduated from law school, my parents wanted to get me a graduation present. I let it be known that what I really wanted

was an Oxford English dictionary. They got me a car. I still have mixed feelings. We also got this question from one of you. I'm very interested in the politicization of language and how people like Merriam-Webster influenced that. Now, Professor Curzan, dictionaries don't just tell us, as we said, what a word means. They can also shape the language of entire countries. Now, the reason American and British words have different spellings is because of one dictionary in particular. What's the story behind that?

That's absolutely true. And dictionaries do play an important role in sometimes legitimizing a variety of English. As Sarah was talking about earlier, when we think about English, English is actually a bundle of dialects. And we have dialects in Britain, the United States, we have Australian English, New Zealand English, but we also have many world Englishes, South African English, Jamaican English, Singaporean English, Indian English. And we have dialects in the United States, we have Australian English, New Zealand English, but we also have many world Englishes, South African English, Jamaican English, Singaporean English, Indian English.

And one of the things a dictionary can do is create a sense of legitimacy and standardization of a variety of English. So to create a dictionary of South African English does that work. Now, Noah Webster, when he was creating his dictionary, which was published, his first edition in 1828, it was at some level a patriotic project.

It was the American dictionary of the English language, and it was designed to stake out the territory of American English. So he included some Americanisms like skunk, and he changed some of the spelling. So that Noah Webster's work, and it was recorded in his dictionary, was

was he is responsible for realize with a Z in the United States and an S in Britain. Honor, no U in the United States with a U in Britain. Theater, R-E, Britain, E-R in the United States. And this one I really struggle with, a word like canceled, one L in the United States, two L's in Britain. So those spellings and people often say, why are those words spelled differently in

It is amazing the specificity of the answer. Noah Webster's project, and then it was picked up in places like the government printing office. But it's also worth noting that he had some spellings that he tried to change that did not work. So I believe I have this right. He wanted soup to be spelled S-O-O-P. I mean, it wouldn't—

Sure, that's soup. That's definitely soup, but it doesn't feel quite the same way. You know, in talking to both of you and seeing your excitement about language and words and dictionaries, it's clear that this is a language. Anytime we do shows about language, people have big feelings. They have strong feelings about any aspect of language we discuss.

But Sarah, I'm thinking back to that moment of discovery you had, finding that address book with the names of the people who contributed to the OED. How has that discovery changed your relationship to the OED and to language as a whole, actually seeing the names, the people who created this text?

That's a brilliant question because, in fact, in now knowing that there were 3,000 people and in spending eight years of my life researching each of those people, and I worked with a wonderful group of my students at Stanford to research them,

What we discovered is that these are not the scholarly elites or the professionals. Most of these people are unknowns. They're amateurs. Many of them are autodidacts. They left school at 14 or 15. And so therefore, as researchers, this was really hard for us to find out about them in their lives. But

But I was insistent. I wanted to find out as much as I could. I wanted to know everything that I could about each person. I wanted to know where they lived, what their profession was, what their work was, who they loved. And, uh,

this picture of a very diverse, eccentric, colourful group of people. We have queer couples. We have the man with the largest collection of pornography sending in all the sex words. We have hopeless contributors such as Eleanor Marks, who was Karl Marx's daughter. So in the address book, James Murray, beside people's names, would, would,

put little comments like hopeless or stole the book or useless. And he would also track the people's lives. So beside many of the women, when they got married, he would put married at this date and therefore this woman's surname changes from this to that. And that so-and-so died at

this date. They are one of his address books. And in the end, I found three address books belonging to James Murray. And then I found three address books belonging to his predecessor. And that's how, with all of these address books, we were then able to know who all these people were.

While we're still getting your messages, Bonnie writes, my dear friend Russell loves the OED more than anything. On a sunny day in 1988, we were lying on a beach and he was working the Sunday puzzle. He looked up and said, wouldn't it be amazing if one day there was a device that you could put in your pocket that could contain the entire OED so you could have it with you everywhere? Yes, if only. What do you think the fact that we have OEDs

language models, AI language models, learning from the OED, that the OED's main clients are no longer individuals but tech companies. What do you think that means for the future of the dictionary, Professor Curzan? I think as Sarah mentioned, dictionaries are

serving a new purpose in terms of what you can do with the data and how it can inform everything from online dictionaries that are working in the background of a book you're reading, something like that, and the ways in which they're informing large language models. I'm struck as we get these calls and emails from listeners, there is still a joy in the book.

And we haven't yet seen the death of the book. Certainly dictionaries, the print dictionary is not what it once was. This historically was a very profitable market.

When you think about, and I'm old enough that when I graduated from high school, it was the graduation gift when you graduated from high school was a print collegiate dictionary. I think that is no longer the case for high schoolers who are going to college. So that market is not the same, and dictionary editors and publishers are having to find other ways to make use of that data. Yeah.

We have just about a minute left here. And Sarah, I'm curious what you hope we'd learn from the dictionary people who weren't, as you said, linguists or experts, but just people who love words.

Yes, they not only loved words, but one of my questions throughout writing the book was why were they doing the project? Why did they give so many of their waking hours to this? And I began to realise that because many of them were not from the scholarly elites...

this was a chance for them to be part of a project that was associated with a prestigious university and to be part of a scholarly world that they were otherwise excluded from. One of the findings of the book is that there were so many women. There were nearly 500 women.

And as you know, women were denied the same opportunities of education as men in the mid to late 19th century. And so this was a chance for intelligent women to contribute to a scholarly project. Not only that, but another finding was just how many Americans contributed to the dictionary, which, of course, we think of this quintessentially British product, but in fact, nearly 15%

of all these people were in America, and they made a superb contribution. Well, we'll leave the conversation there for now. That's Sarah Ogilvie, a linguist and former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. She's also the author of The Dictionary People, the unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary. Also with us, Anne Curzan. She's a professor of English at the University of Michigan. Her latest book is called Says Who? A kinder, funner usage guide for everyone who cares about words. Thanks to you both.

Today's producer was Haley Blassingame. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington, distributed by NPR. I'm Jen White. Thanks for listening. Nyla Budu is with you tomorrow for the Friday News Roundup. Hope you tune in. We'll talk more soon. This is 1A.

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